Note 32 — REIGN OF MARY: 1561-1565.

William Barclay, De Regno et Regali Potestate adversus Monarchomachos. Parisiis, 1600. This author was a native of Aberdeenshire, but finally settled at Angers, in France, as Professor of Civil Law in the University there. He died in 1604.

Bishop Geddes, in introducing this extract from Barclay’s forgotten work to the notice of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland (1782), remarks that a still more grand entertainment of the same kind was given in 1529 to King James V., his mother, Queen Margaret, and the pope’s legate, by the then Earl of Athole, and that an account of the affair has been preserved in Lindsay of Pitscottie’s History of Scotland. The venerable bishop adds: ‘Need I take notice that the hunting described by Barclay bears some resemblance to the batidas of the present king of Spain, where several huntsmen form a line and drive the deer through a narrow pass, at one side of which the king, with some attendants, has his post, in a green but of boughs, and slaughters the poor animals as they come out almost as fast as charged guns can be put into his hand and he fire them. These are things sufficiently known; and the same manner of stag-hunting is practised in Italy, Germany, and other parts of Europe.’421